Fifty must-have apps, from A to Z: here’s a list of essentials every iPad owner should consider. Each entry features alternative options to check out too, for well over 150 apps.
Adobe Reader (Free Apps)
Previewing e-mailed PDF files is built in to the iPad’s Mail app, but Adobe’s free Reader app includes advanced functions such as annotations, text search, highlighting, online synchronization and the ability to fill out form fields. If you work with PDF files a lot, this one’s a must.
For those times when you need to use a big-boy computer, Air Display can turn your iPad into a second monitor to give you a bit more screen real estate to work with. The $10 app works with Mac and Windows machines, connecting the iPad to your computer over your wi-fi network.
See also: MaxiVista, Splashtop XDisplay
Allrecipes (Free Apps)
Referencing an iPad while cooking is usually far less cumbersome than using a computer, and the free Allrecipes app puts thousands of recipes at your fingertips. The $5 Pro version gets rid of ads and lets you sync with your Allrecipes.com account’s recipe box and shopping lists.
See also: BigOven, Epicurious
Blogsy ($4.99)
There’s no shortage of ways to update a blog, but Blogsy stands a cut above its competitors. The $5 app sports an easy-to-use interface for beginners and plenty of advanced options for power users, all while being compatible with several popular blogging platforms.
See also: WordPress, Tumblr, Blogger
Calculator for iPad Free (Free Apps)
Because math is hard and the iPad doesn’t include a built-in calculator, there’s Calculator for iPad Free. Like its name suggests, the app is free and includes both a standard and a scientific calculator; a $2 upgrade gives you several color schemes to choose from.
See also: Calculator HD, Calculator Pro
Catalog Spree (Free Apps)
Under normal circumstances, you’d need a pickup truck to lug 350 catalogs around. The free Catalog Spree app shrinks 350 popular catalogs into digital form and lets you swipe through pages and pages of potential purchases without breaking a sweat.
See also: Google Catalogs, Catalogs.com for iPad
Chrome (Free Apps)
If you use Google’s Chrome Web browser on your computer, loading the free app onto your iPad is a no-brainer simply for the ability to synchronize your browsing history, passwords and bookmarks. Incognito Mode gives you the option of browsing more privately.
See also: Dolphin, iCab, Opera Mini
CloudOn (Free Apps)
If you find yourself in a pinch needing to work with Microsoft Office files, the free CloudOn app might be just what you’re looking for. You’ll have access to Word, Excel and PowerPoint, along with the ability to open documents straight from popular online file-storage services.
See also: Quickoffice Pro HD, Documents to Go Premium
Comics (Free Apps)
Comixology’s aptly titled Comics app is an essential for any fan, featuring more than 30,000 comic books from publishers big and small. Guided View breathes a bit of life into each title, swooping from panel to panel, and purchased comic books are available on other devices as well.
See also: Comics Reader Pro, Comic Zeal
Tablet Mastered – Step By Step Video Training For The iPad!
Dropbox (Free Apps)
Access important files anywhere with this cloud-storage service. Save a file to the Dropbox folder on your computer and it’ll be available from the Dropbox iPad app. Automatically save photos and videos from your iPad to your Dropbox account to access them from other devices as well.
See also: Google Drive, SkyDrive, Box,SugarSync
Evernote (Free Apps)
Sometimes you find yourself collecting so much digital stuff that you need a place to keep it all. For that, there’s Evernote. This free app lets you store your notes, ideas, to-do lists and much more — all synchronized for access from other devices as well.
The world’s most popular social network on the world’s most popular tablet? This one’s an easy pick. Keep tabs on what your friends are up to, play games, add updates to your profile and chat with others. If you’re an active Facebook user, this free app will be quite a time-sink for you.
See also: Google+, Twitter
Fanhattan (Free Apps)
There’s no shortage of streaming TV and movie services available, but launching separate apps for each one quickly gets cumbersome. The free Fanhattan app acts like a slick launchpad to other popular streaming apps, letting you find and watch what you want with minimal fuss.
See also: Netflix, Hulu Plus, Amazon Instant Video
FastZip ($1.99)
You’re playing hooky from the office when your boss sends you a compressed file and asks for your opinion. Use the $2 FastZip app to view the file, and use it again to compress a file of your own to send back to headquarters. The app features advanced options for securing important files too.
See also: WinZip
Feedly (Free Apps)
Cruising your RSS feeds is a breeze with Feedly. The free app presents your favorite news sources in a slick-yet-simple interface, highlights which posts are popular with other users and lets you browse for additional sources to add to your collection.
See also: Feedler, News
Find My Friends (Free Apps)
Apple’s free Find My Friends app lets you locate your iPad-, iPhone- and iPod Touch–toting friends (with their permission, of course). Fire up the app and you’ll see your friends represented on an ever updating map; you can also set up alerts to learn when friends are on the move.
See also: Glympse, GPS Phone Tracker, Find My iPhone
Flipboard (Free Apps)
One of the best-looking apps on our list, Flipboard bills itself as “your personal magazine.” Browse handpicked articles on various topics and pipe in updates from your Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Tumblr accounts for a one-stop shop that caters to your interests.
See also: Zite, Google Currents, Pulse
Google Earth (Free Apps)
Want to take a trip without leaving your couch? Check out Google Earth. The search giant’s free app stitches together satellite imagery of lands near and far, and even includes 3-D-modeled buildings in several major cities around the world.
Hipmunk takes the traditional flight-search model and turns it on its head, showing flights sorted first by “agony,” then by price and other factors. You’re treated to a grid of at-a-glance info about which flights have wi-fi and which have long layovers, all in a fun, easy-to-use interface.
Spend time in front of your TV and you’ll eventually want to know why that person in that one show or movie looks so familiar. The free IMDb (Internet Movie Database) app has info on over 2 million TV shows and movies and over 4 million actors, directors and crew members.
See also: iTunes Movie Trailers, Movies by Flixster
Imo (Free Apps)
It’s rare to find all your chat buddies using the same platform. Imo looks to simplify things by connecting to various popular services — Facebook, Google Talk, Skype, AIM and many more — and presents it all in a straightforward, tablet-specific interface. The app is free.
See also: Trillian, IM+
Tablet Mastered – Step By Step Video Training For The iPad!
Interior Design ($9.99)
Before you start moving furniture around willy-nilly, take the time to map out your home using this $10 design app to make sure everything will fit first. Once all your stuff’s in place, take a 3-D walk-through of each room to see what they will look like in real life.
Yahoo’s free IntoNow app uses your iPad’s microphone to identify whatever TV show you’re watching in real time based on the show’s audio track. Once the show has been identified, you can watch (and opine, of course) with friends who are also watching the show.
Of all the things to shrink down so it fits inside an iPad, a world-class education might top the list. Apple’s iTunes U app features over half a million lectures, videos and books from some of the top learning institutions around the globe — all for free.
The Join.me app lets you host dead-simple virtual meetings by directing attendees to the Join.me site (or iPad app) and having them enter a code. A Pro account costs $149 a year and lets you host meetings; attending meetings hosted by others is free.
There are several worthwhile e-book reading apps to choose from, but Amazon’s Kindle platform gets the nod thanks to its availability on just about every other device on the market. If it’s connected, you can probably use it to read a Kindle book.
Murphy’s law: You’ll forget something important on your computer and won’t realize it until it’s almost too late. The free LogMeIn app lets you connect to your home computer (make sure to leave it turned on) and control it remotely as though you were sitting in front of it.
Instead of downloading separate apps to keep track of each credit-card and bank account you own, try Mint. The free app connects to all your accounts and displays your balances, lets you customize a budget and shows your spending trends organized by category.
Newsy boils down the day’s news into short, straightforward videos that pull in angles from various sources. The free service covers most major categories and features professional anchors who deliver the news in easy-to-digest, no-fluff snippets.
Paper is a free iPad app with a simple interface that lets you write, sketch and paint in virtual notebooks. It may not seem like rocket science, but realistically replicating the feel of various writing and art utensils on a tablet screen is a complicated feat that Paper pulls off with style.
See also: SketchBook Express, ColorBox HD
Tablet Mastered – Step By Step Video Training For The iPad!
Photo Editor by Aviary (Free Apps)
For a free image editor, this app from Aviary features a wealth of features. Aside from being able to crop and rotate your photos, there’s red-eye reduction, blemish removal, teeth whitening and more. You can add doodles, text and stickers to liven up your images as well.
Believe it or not, editing videos on an iPad isn’t quite as cumbersome as you might think. Case in point: the $13 Pinnacle Studio app, which sports an easy-to-use interface and powerful editing features. After your masterpiece is complete, use the built-in uploader to share it with others.
It took Pinterest, the Web’s most popular pin board, until last August to roll out an iPad app. Better late than never, as the free app makes for a great couch companion. Pass the time browsing your friends’ pins, or pin things from around the Web that you’d like to revisit later.
Pocket lets you grab various bits from around the Web — articles, videos, images and more — and save them for later perusal. The free app takes text articles and strips out all the ads, buttons and other digital detritus to present a clean, easy-on-the-eyes reading experience.
The iPad’s built-in FaceTime feature makes it a snap to video-chat with other Apple owners, but — surprise! — not everyone owns Apple products. Skype makes video chatting a bit more universal, with apps for just about every platform and tons of active users.
StumbleUpon (Free Apps)
StumbleUpon has long perfected the art of serving up random items of interest on the Web to users who just want something to do. Choose an interest, hit the big red button and give a thumbs-up or thumbs-down to whatever is presented to you. Repeat.
StumbleUpon has long perfected the art of serving up random items of interest on the Web to users who just want something to do. Choose an interest, hit the big red button and give a thumbs-up or thumbs-down to whatever is presented to you. Repeat.
Keeping up with the latest sports scores is easy with TheScore’s free app, which features live scoring and breaking alerts covering just about every major sporting event. Aside from scores, the app features plenty of news and player bios to keep sports fans endlessly occupied.
The free Titan Downloader app features a built-in Web browser that lets you save video files you find on various sites for playback at a later time. You can queue up multiple videos to play one after another and set a pass-code lock to prevent others from accessing your collection.
As a TripIt user, you can make travel bookings and forward the confirmation e-mails from your airline, hotel, car-rental service and more to plans@tripit.com; those bookings will then be organized into a coherent itinerary available from within the free app.
Think of the free TuneIn app as being able to turn your iPad into a radio capable of pulling in just about any station from just about anywhere in the world. The service boasts 70,000 live radio-station feeds and 2 million podcasts to choose from.
See also: Songza, Pandora, SiriusXM
Tablet Mastered – Step By Step Video Training For The iPad!
TV Guide (Free Apps)
You only have so many hands, so instead of putting down your iPad to pull up your TV’s on-screen guide, you can use the free TV Guide app to see what’s on at the moment. Results can be filtered by HD and favorite channels, and you can watch episodes you’ve missed by launching into various streaming apps.
There are plenty of free ways to interact with Twitter, but the $3 Tweetbot app is well worth the price of admission, with an eye-popping design, time-saving gestures that you can customize to perform various tricks and connections to several third-party Web services.
The more you use Waze, the smarter it gets. Aside from helping you find your way around, this free GPS app collects data as you’re driving and lumps it with other drivers’ data to relay real-time traffic conditions. It’ll work best if your iPad has a cellular data connection.
The free Weather Channel app makes good use of the iPad’s screen to display high-res weather backgrounds, bolstered by a slew of forecast data, maps, safety alerts and videos. You can check out the current conditions in your area along with hour-by-hour, five-day and 10-day forecasts.
WebMD’s free iPad app takes the wealth of information available on the WebMD site and makes it tablet-friendly. Use the popular symptom checker, research various drugs and treatments or leverage your iPad’s location chip to find the pharmacy closest to you.
If there’s one thing mobile gadgets have been good for, it’s settling arguments. And the $3 Wolfram Alpha app is great at settling extremely complex arguments. It’s like a natural-language search engine mixed with an encyclopedia on steroids that can do high-level math.
Wunderlist is the easiest way to manage and share your daily to-do lists. Whether you’re planning an overseas adventure, sharing a shopping list with a loved one, or simply keeping track of your daily to-dos, Wunderlist is here to help you get things done. Download now to see why more than 4 million people around the world love Wunderlist and have made it their daily companion.
See also: Remember The Milk, Errands To-Do List
Yelp (Free Apps)
If you’re on vacation or new in town (heck, or even not-so-new in town) and you want to learn about what’s around you — shops, restaurants, dry cleaners, gas stations, bars, you name it — Yelp has you covered, complete with user reviews so you can separate the good from the bad.
It’s the world’s largest and most popular video-sharing site, and you’re almost certainly going to want to watch some of its videos on your iPad. This free app pulls in your channel subscriptions, features voice search and can sling videos to your TV set using compatible hardware boxes.
At the end of the day — or maybe even in the middle of the day — you sometimes need a peaceful moment. (Perhaps you’ve just clicked through 50 slides in a slideshow.) The free ZenView app serves up beautiful images that you can touch to create serene droplets of water. Go ahead — you’ve earned it!
See also: Photo Ripples, Fish Pond Fun
Tablet Mastered – Step By Step Video Training For The iPad!
Data source: Time (By Doug Aamoth) [one app has been changed]
Dragon Tear is a great rpg game. Great app. Go try it-- https://itunes.apple.com/app/dragon-tear/id589367593?ls=1&mt=8
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